This project which is jointly funded by the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and the Division of Engineering Education and Centers will extend an existing research tool used to assess students' problem solving abilities, MuseInk, into a tool for feedback-rich instructional delivery. MuseInk, developed by a Co-PI (Bowman), is a novel Tablet PC application that assists researchers in studying problem solving strategies. MuseInk is currently in use by the research group to investigate how students with different academic preparation and prior knowledge progress in developing problem-solving skills in a first year engineering program. The specific goals of this project are to 1) harden MuseInk and add functionality specific for instruction, 2) expand and develop new built-in analysis tools and visualizations in MuseInk, and 3) develop an online community for MuseInk adopters to share materials, ideas, and support. The outcomes of ?CU Thinking: Research to Practice? will open a communication channel between classroom practitioners and researchers and facilitate the translation of research to practice. Through the development of advanced features and visualizations within MuseInk, the community of adopters will be able to share best practices of MuseInk adoption for both in-class and out-of-class educational experiences. At the same time, the development of the community will enable greater opportunities for collaboration on instructional materials, assessment methodologies, and research projects. The feedback from users, observation of community interactions, and analysis of the assessments and materials developed by researchers and instructors will sustainably drive the future direction of MuseInk development.
The main NSF IEECI Grant "CU Thinking" (award # EEC-0935163) focused on researching problem solving strategies and processes that lead to successful solutions for first year students, and on using those findings to develop problems related to the engineering grand challenges. The supplement to this grant, "CU Thinking: Research to Practice," aimed to translate research findings to materials and tools for instructional purposes, and to provide students with feedback on their problem solving strategies and processes. The focus of this project is on assessing students’ problem solving processes in a way that instructors can give feedback to help students build engineering skills. An assessment tool was developed to provide instructors a means to give students feedback on their problem solving processes. As seen in the rubric, a correct final answer does not have a significant impact on the final score for a student as it is one sixth of the entire rubric. This rubric is designed to weigh conceptualization, or a student’s understanding of the problem, and process, or a student’s execution of important steps to reach a final answer. Conceptualization includes defining the knowns and unknowns, making sound assumptions, and correctly representing the problem through a diagram or sketch. Process is meant to test students understanding of the problem execution, management of data and accuracy/justification of results. The assessment tool is in the process of being tested for reliability and validity, especially when used to assess ill-defined problems based on real-world scenarios that are appropriate for first year engineering students. The results of this study, and a finalized instructional tool, have been accepted for presentation at ASEE 2013 in Atlanta, GA: Benson, L., S. Grigg, J. VanDyken and B. Morkos. Process Analysis as a Feedback Tool for Development of Engineering Problem Solving Skills. Accepted for presentation at the ASEE 2013 Conference, June 23-26, Atlanta, GA. Other papers and presentations resulting from this work: Grigg, S. J. and L. C. Benson. Work In Progress: Robust Engineering Problems for the Study of Problem Solving Strategies. Proceedings of the 41st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Rapid City, SD, October 12-15, 2011. Grigg, S., L. Benson and C. McGough. Technology Adoption Behaviors in a First Year Engineering Classroom. 2011 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings.
